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Snowpocalypse!

Northern Virginia is in the path of the biggest winter storm ever. It is so virtually fearsome that the city of Alexandria announced that schools would be closed tomorrow. Closed even before the snow is due to fall! The teenagers at the physical therapy place all said, "Woot!" when that was announced on TV this afternoon. Or maybe they said, "Yeah!" or "Score!" I wasn't paying such close attention because I was listening for announcements that might relate to me.

My employer is on the "you can use vacation time to make up for missed hours without prior approval from your supervisor" schedule which means that I am going to work tomorrow. My clever plan is to leave my car in the parking deck and take the bus home so that I won't have to dig my car out from under the twenty inches of snow they are forecasting.

After I left the physical therapy place, I figured I'd swing by a supermarket. All I wanted was a half gallon of milk and a few apples. I've got plenty of food in the house, but I'm low on milk and out of apples. I'm low on Parmesan too.

The parking lot of the big Giant was filled with cars, both parked and circling like vultures. I swung up one row, down the next, and decided to try the little Giant closer to home. At the little Giant, same thing. I parked across the street in the empty parking lot for the dog run and baseball field. Looking in the front window of the market, I saw the lines ten or twelve deep, laughed, and walked back to my car. The lines are long, the shelves will be bare. Very Soviet Union and all, but I didn't feel like investing the time.

Back at home, my landlady came down to tell me that her employer would be putting her and her coworkers all up in hotels downtown so they wouldn't have to send out commando teams to collect staff. The dog is going to puppy camp for the weekend. She's arranged to have someone shovel out the front walk and the walk back to my entrance (which I hadn't even thought about). Her housemate left today to spend a week in New Orleans. The real Southern lady has excellent timing. (I will be sure to knock the snow off her car, thereby returning the favor she did me after the last snowpocalypse.)

We exchanged supermarket stories and she offered to let me raid her housemate's milk carton.

I told Oz about the coming snowpocalypse and we discussed which of the four horsemen comes for a snowpocalypse. He said Famine and that's why everyone runs to the store. I think it's Santa Claus picking up a little extra work after the holidays.

I still wanted to get some apples, so later I went for the full pre-snowpocalypse experience by making a fruitless (literally) trip to the organic market. Sure enough, the parking lot had a couple orders of magnitude more cars than usual and I saw people loading a week's worth of groceries into their SUVs. Under normal weather conditions people rarely get more than a couple bags of groceries at the organic market.

Inside, the produce section was bare except for ginger (quite a lot of ginger, actually) and a few other things. They did have citrus fruit (I'm mildly allergic), coconuts (hard to eat out of hand at the office), and red delicious apples (why bother?). The milk section, also bare. Not even buttermilk, which I figured I'd get a quart and do some baking this weekend, but that was not to be.

I found this really entertaining, but some people did not.

One woman was pacing around the frozen case, saying, "I'm really stressed. There's nothing left but fake shit."

"That stuff's okay." Her husband pointed to the shelves of soymilk and kefir.

"So it's organic fake shit. I don't want fake shit!"

Tomorrow I plan to walk over to the Whole Foods near the office and check out their empty dairy section (and the frazzled shoppers freaking out over the prospect of soymilk).